In their place we have digital nomads, juggling projects and feverishly scanning data from “hot desks” in coffee shops.
Jana, previously called Txteagle, is the largest employer in Kenya, founded in 2008 by a computer engineer called Nathan Eagle. It has 10,000 workers in Kenya, but does not pay a penny for office space to house any of them. In fact, the company’s founder has never met most of its employees. Txteagle sends small jobs to anyone with access to a cell phone. The jobs are tiny—little bits of translation, a quick market research survey, or a handful of images to be tagged—each of which pays just a few cents each.
To some extent, Jana is simply a tale of a savvy entrepreneur and the way companies are chopping up big tasks into small bits, aided by technology. But it’s also a story about the future of work, especially the way in which independent or freelance workers are taking over from salaried employees.

He further argued that the UK and European economy’s future growth would be driven by a digital revolution. “We may in fact look back in time when we went from BC ‘before connectivity’ to AD ‘after digital’ and that is being driven by innovation and social media.” He described connectivity as the oxygen of modern life for consumers, whilst stressing telecommunications are a major part of the country’s infrastructure in the economy. “More people on the planet have access to a mobile phone than clean drinking water or a toothbrush,” he explained, based on information taken from an Ofcom report.12
Figure 8.1: This chart shows that in the UK ICT Capital (in green) makes a proportionately larger contribution to economic growth than in any of the other countries.
Meanwhile, the economists in the UK government’s economic service have carried out some research into the importance of innovation (largely from ICT) in driving the UK’s economic growth.13 The report shows a diagram of how innovation propels growth on its first page which is too complicated to be easily reproduced14 but the elaborate detail of it captures what is a realistic point: the routes through which innovation affects the economy are multifarious.

That situation is rapidly changing. In 2000, for example, there were approximately seven hundred million mobile phone subscriptions in the world, fewer than 30 percent of which were in developing countries.9 By 2012 there were more than six billion subscriptions, over 75 percent of which were in the developing world. The World Bank estimates that three-quarters of the people on the planet now have access to a mobile phone, and that in some countries mobile telephony is more widespread than electricity or clean water.
The first mobile phones bought and sold in the developing world were capable of little more than voice calls and text messages, yet even these simple devices could make a significant difference. Between 1997 and 2001 the economist Robert Jensen studied a set of coastal villages in Kerala, India, where fishing was the main industry.10 Jensen gathered data both before and after mobile phone service was introduced, and the changes he documented are remarkable.

According to the study on information flows in the Arab revolutions conducted by Lotan et al. (2011: 1389), “bloggers played an important role in surfacing and disseminating news from Tunisia, as they had a substantially higher likelihood to engage their audience to participate, compared with any other actor type.”
Given the role of the Internet in spreading and coordinating the revolt, it is significant to point out that Tunisia has one of the highest rates of Internet and mobile phone penetration in the Arab world. In November 2010, 67 percent of the urban population had access to a mobile phone, and 37 percent were connected to the Internet. In early 2011, 20 percent of Internet users were on Facebook, a percentage that is two times higher than in Morocco, three times higher than in Egypt, five times higher than in Algeria or Libya, and twenty times higher than in Yemen. Furthermore, the proportion of Internet users among the urban population and particularly among the urban youth was much higher.

CHAPTER 16
THE WORLD WE DREAM, THE FUTURE WE CREATE TOGETHER
“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.”
—ROBERT F. KENNEDY
Thirty summers have passed since I gave away the blue sweater that ended up on a little Rwandan boy. Since then, the world has greatly changed. The boy I encountered had never seen a television show, made a telephone call, or taken a photograph, whereas his counterpart today, an urban youth wearing secondhand clothes in Kigali, is likely to have access to a cell phone and the Internet. As for my counterpart, today’s 20-something professional working in Kigali won’t feel the isolation I did; she is likely to e-mail and call her friends on Skype at least once a day and check her local newspaper on the Internet to learn about the goings-on at home. We have the tools to know one another and the resources to create a future in which every human being, rich or poor, has a real chance to pursue a life of greater purpose.

But what’s new in this equation—connectivity—promises that kids with access to mobile devices and the Internet will be able to experience school physically and virtually, even if the latter is informal and on their own time.
In places where basic needs are poorly met by the government, or in insecure areas, basic digital technologies like mobile phones will offer safe and inexpensive options for families looking to educate their children. A child who cannot attend school due to distance, lack of security or school fees will have a lifeline to the world of learning if she has access to a mobile phone. Even for those children without access to data plans or the mobile web, basic mobile services, like text messages and IVR (interactive voice response, a form of voice-recognition technology), can provide educational outlets. Loading tablets and mobile phones with high-quality education applications and entertainment content before they are sold will ensure that the “bandwidth poor,” who lack reliable connectivity, will still benefit from access to these devices.